Saturday, 18 November 2017

Hormuz Patravala and the Fate of the Disbeliever

This story first appeared in the third issue of UnBound magazine, released on Taylor Swift Day, 2016. It was published under the by-line 'Percy Wadiwala'. The magazine features stories by a number of fantastic writers, including Anon-i-am, Galina Trefil and Archana Sarat, and can be purchased here.

Hormuz
Patrawala and the Fate of the Disbeliever

The people of the small
hamlet of Dhoparwadi were unaccustomed to much by way of excitement. Theirs was
a calm life, a gentle life, centred around fishing and working on the sprawling
chikoo farm on the Dorabjee estate. So for years afterwards, the story of the
water-drenched young man with torn trousers who had run, screaming all the way,
through the village towards the highway would be told over steaming hot cups of
tea at the Dhoparwadi Tea Stall, making September 17, 2016, rather a red-letter
day in the town’s history.

The circumstances of the
events that unfolded encompass a wide range of issues, magical, mundane,
literary and corporate, but thankfully, by tracing them backwards in time, we
can try to make some sense of them, perhaps even finding some pleasure in their
recounting.

So without any further ado,
let us begin:

September
17, 2016 (earlier the same day)

The white sedan rolled up the
hill from the village of Dhoparwadi towards the heavy wrought-iron gates.
‘Dorabjee Chikoo Farms’, read the nameplate on the pillar, and as Bhavin Dedhia,
Chief Manager at DCTMR Bank, turned into the gate, he wondered just how big
these estates were. He had barely driven a few feet further when a man walked
onto the road a few meters ahead of him and waved him to stop.

“Well ‘ollo, if it ain’t
young Miss Rocky,” said the man, as she lowered the window.

“Farid, you look frail and
shrunken. Haven’t you been eating your vegetables?” said Roxanne ‘Rocky’
Colabewala, Bhavin’s colleague and Secretary to his boss, jumping out of the
car. Dedhia swallowed nervously. Farid was at least six feet tall and nearly as
broad. He seemed not to have shaved in at least a decade, and wore a shirt that
was outsized even for him.

“I’ve been all right, Miss
Rocky. Come this way.”

They began to walk down a dirt
track. Dedhia was not pleased. Despite the fact that he was wearing his Weekend
Special Rocky Seduction Pink Shirt, she had steadfastly been ignoring him
during their drive up from Mumbai.

“Hey! What about me?” he
called out.

“Oh I’m so sorry. This is Mr
Dedhia, he’s driven me here.”

Farid looked Dedhia up and
down as though examining a particularly distasteful specimen of rotten chikoo.

“Right. Park the car there
and come along.”

‘There’ was a garage off to
the right where Dedhia could see two cars, and a bored-looking horse. He parked
the car as far from the horse as possible and returned to where Rocky and Farid
stood waiting for him. He followed them until they arrived at a horse-cart. Or
rather, what would have been a horse-cart had there been a horse to drag it.

“All right, come on then,”
said Farid, and climbed onto the driver’s seat.

“What? Where? There’s no…,”
began Dedhia, wondering if that horse he had seen was going to trot over and
tether itself, but Rocky had already hopped on behind the big man. Dedhia
shuffled over to the side of the cart where she was sitting and said in an
urgent whisper, “Is the fellow mad? Is he yeda[1]?
Why are you getting on this horseless carriage? Are you just humouring him?”

“Don’t stand there yapping,”
said Rocky, ignoring his words and moving to the right. “Come on up, and give
me that car key, or you’ll drop it jumping in.”

Mentally uttering multiple
curses in his mind about the madness of Parsees, he obeyed her, tearing his
trousers on a bent nail in the process. The cart gave a jerk and began to move.
Dedhia stifled a cry as it wound its way through the dirt track, tall chikoo
trees on either side, eventually joining the concrete road. They moved at a
steady pace, while Farid held the traces as though there actually were a horse
riding ahead of them.

Dedhia sat quietly in his
seat for the rest of the journey, but his teeth did chatter occasionally for
reasons that had nothing to do with the bumpy road. Rocky seemed less and less
like the hottest chick in office and more like some sort of horrifying, Godless
witch. He found himself wondering whether even her stupendous charms outweighed
her apparent devotion to the dark arts like fiction-reading and magic.

After a fifteen-minute ride,
they reached the house, a massive brick structure with a wooden door and a tall
fountain with naked nymphs outside. It was an imposing structure, three storeys
tall. Had Dedhia been more knowledgeable, he would have identified it as an
example of Gothic revival architecture.

“Aunt Rocky!”

The shriek made Dedhia jump,
and when he saw who had uttered it – a little fellow in a black robe and
conical hat, holding a foot-long wooden twig in his hand and wearing round
spectacles on his eyes, he nearly fainted. This looked too much like a little
demon-child for his comfort. Then an old man emerged into the light, even
larger than Farid, with a wealth of white hair and a thick beard of the same
colour, wearing a purple robe with stars embroidered on it.

“Come in, come in, Rocky,” he
said.

“Always glad to visit, Uncle
Soli.”

“And who’s this?” the old
apparition asked.

This time Dedhia felt himself
surveyed as though he were a worm crawling out of a rotten chikoo.

“He drove me here,” explained
Rocky, and they all went in.

As they walked through a dark
corridor and hall, Dedhia could vaguely make out the furniture, massive wooden
desks and tables and candlesticks and wood-framed oil paintings.

“Can we have some light,
Hormuz?” came the old man’s voice.

The boy nodded, waved his
twig at the ceiling, and in an instant, electric light flooded their sight. Dedhia
shuddered. This was darkness. The light was darkness. Evil magic abounded, he
could just feel it. But now they had arrived at a sitting-room, and the
white-haired men motioned to them to sit. Dedhia found himself on a sofa next
to Farid, while Rocky and her nephew sat on another opposite them. Uncle Soli
sat in solitary splendour on a rocking chair.

An awkward silence ensued,
with Rocky and her nephew’s chatting the only sound. Dedhia could not make out
much of their conversation, hampered as he was by Uncle Soli’s gimlet eye fixed
firmly upon him. He caught a few stray snatches of words but they seemed utter
gibberish – ‘Hogwarts’ was one, ‘Owlery’ was another and at one time he thought
he heard ‘Wandlore by correspondence’ but he could not have sworn to it.

“Uncle Soli, why don’t you
show Mr. Dedhia around the house while Hormuz and I pack his stuff for the
journey home?” suggested Rocky.

Dedhia cursed under his
breath as the huge old man laboured to his feet. He had no choice but to get up
too, and as soon as he did, Uncle Soli slapped him on the back, no doubt
meaning to be friendly. To Dedhia, it seemed as though someone had exploded a
grenade in his back. He staggered at Uncle Soli’s side as they went through a
dining room, up a set of stairs, around several rooms full of portraits,
writing desks, antique tea-sets, mementos of ancestors of Uncle Soli and eerie
statues of elves, orcs and the occasional unicorn. All the while, the old man
spoke in a sort of polished, Victorian English that Dedhia understood very
little of, telling little stories of how ‘Grand Uncle Shapoor used to make
chikoo wine in the backyard’ and ‘Aunt Bikaji could consume a whole litre of
Johnny Walker and not totter a degree from the perpendicular’.

When they finally came back
downstairs, Rocky and Hormuz were sitting in a room that Uncle Soli called the
‘library’. This, Dedhia thought, clearly showed how mad these people were,
because the only library he knew was SuperStar Video Library at Charkop, and
this room full of books, and nothing but books, inside a private home was not
that at all.

He found a cushioned chair
and began to fiddle with his phone, resting his elbow on a handsome,
leather-bound copy of a book by some guy called George Eliot. Minutes passed,
and he fell into a doze even as Rocky and her nephew’s words permeated through
to his brain. Once again they seemed to speak some strange foreign language,
talking about things like ‘Wolfsbane’ and ‘Bezoars’ and ‘Transfiguration’ and ‘dealing
with the bat-bogey hex’. As he dozed off, he felt transported into another
world, a world where rules did not apply, and the only boundaries were those
set by your own imagination. It was a world where magic was real, unicorns
existed, men could speak with snakes, women could turn into cats, and boys and
girls soared high above in the clouds on wooden broomsticks.

But even in his dream, Dedhia
was aware it was not a world he could be a part of, hobbled as he was by an
imagination that had been boxed-in for years by the rectangular lines of
textbooks, where popcorn was more real than unicorns, where snakes were what he
ate with evening tea, cats were unclean creatures to be driven away, and
broomsticks had plastic handles, rendering them incapable of flight.

He woke up to Rocky patting
his back, saying ‘Lunch’.

The table was set for four.
He sat next to Rocky, while the kid sat opposite, and Uncle Soli at the head of
the table. It was while he was spooning down the last helping of pudding that
the kid, who had finished a while back and was fidgeting visibly, asked,

“Aunt Rocky, what is your
driver’s name?”

“I’m not her…,” he began, but
Rocky cut him off.

“Death Eater,” she said,
before correcting herself and adding in an inexplicably softer voice, “Dedhia,
I mean. Bhavin Dedhia.”

Dedhia had no idea what a
Death Eater was, but it made the kid go berserk. He vaulted onto the table and pointed
that twig of his at Bhavin, screaming ‘Reducto’.
At the same time, the chair seemed to break under him, and he found himself
sprawled on the floor on his back.

“Hormuz, what did I say about
using dangerous curses on guests?” said Uncle Soli mildly.

“I’m sorry, Uncle S,” the boy
sounded forlorn.

“Ok, one more spell,” said
Rocky, with a gracious smile. “A mild one, nothing too harmful.”

“Aguamenti,” said the boy, but his heart did not seem to be in it.
Not that it made a difference. The skies seemed to have opened – or rather,
since they were indoors, the ground-floor-ceiling seemed to have opened – and a
stream of water sprinkled down onto Dedhia’s Weekend Special Rocky Seduction Pink
Shirt.

It was the last straw.
Sputtering, soaking, shivering, Bhavin Dedhia crawled out of range of the spell
and sobbed.

“This is what I do to Death-Eaters!”
proclaimed the nasty devil-spawn child, waving the twig again. Before he could
cast another spell, however, Dedhia took to his heels, racing towards the door.

####

September
12, 2016 (five days earlier)

“What are you reading, eh?
Anything interesting?”

Roxanne cast a glance from
her stunning dark eyes over the book she was reading at the speaker, a certain Bhavin
Dedhia, Chief Manager, all five-feet-eight inches of him.

“MadameBovary,” she said
crisply. It was International Banking Conference week and most of the Big
Chiefs of the Bank were in Moscow, leaving the ordinary braves of the tribe to
read books (as Rocky was doing) or flirt with hot girls (as Dedhia was doing),
but that did not mean she enjoyed the interruption in the slightest.

“Eh, fiction? What’s it
about?”

Rocky had resumed reading,
but put aside the book once more, only the slight twitch of her exquisite nose
betraying her irritation.

“It’s about the young wife of
a country doctor whose search for fulfilment leads her down a path of adultery
and moral degradation.”

“Eh, what nonsense you read!
Some new author?”

“Gustave Flaubert, 1856.”

“I don’t know how you people
can read fiction, men.”

If Dedhia’s eyes had been on
Rocky’s dainty feet rather than her superb figure, he would have noticed that
she was tapping the right one on the carpeted floor.

“And what do you read?”

“Oh I read non-fiction, you
know. Like, autobiographies and management books and all.”

“Like Seven Habits and Napoleon Hill?”

“Yeah yeah, and biographies
of great people.”

“Fascinating. Great people
like whom?”

“You know, Modiji and Trumpji
and so on.”

The smile on her face was
dazzling. Dedhia basked in it. It would have taken a more perceptive observer
than him to realise it was a very strained stretching of the lips.

“Carry on, then,” she said.

But Dedhia was not one to
take a hint.

“It’s not real you know,
fiction.”

“No, it isn’t. I’m sure the
biographies you read are completely factual though. Now did you need something
from me, or…?”

“What stupid things there are
in fiction, men. Fantasy stuff, childish stuff. You take this guy JK Rowling…”

“Woman.”

“Eh?”

“Woman. She’s a woman.”

“Yeah yeah, right. So this
Harry Potter book she’s written, I mean really, kya nonsense hai yaar.[2]Wizards going to some magic school? Like what the eff, eh?” he flailed his
arms about to indicate just how ridiculous he thought the premise was, knocking
over Rocky’s souvenir miniature Eiffel Tower by mistake. “As if such things are
real, eh?”

“And is it so wrong to have a
bit of the child in us?” asked Rocky, looking up into his eyes, searching for a
trace of hope for his soul.

“Bah, what Wizards and magic!
Childish fake stuff, give children such stupid ideas. My younger sister teaches
in a school and one of the kids came dressed up in a black robe and conical hat
on his birthday saying he was Harry Potter. How stupid is that?”

Once again Rocky smiled at
Dedhia. This time the most perceptive observer would have been hard-pressed to
detect the contempt behind it.

“What are you doing this
weekend, Bhavin?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

“I…what? Oh, there’s a
program, you know, like, girl-seeing, for marriage, my parents have fixed up
something with these people in Ghatkopar…”

“I was hoping you could take
me on a drive? Saturday? I have to go to Dahanu to fetch a nephew of mine back
to Bombay. If we leave at eight, we should be able to catch lunch at my
relative’s farmhouse and be back by evening.”

“I…eh…you mean you and me? Seeing
girl, you know, for, but I mean, like no I can?” Dedhia felt a combination of
ecstasy, arousal and disbelief that rendered him spectacularly inarticulate.

“My car’s in the repair shop,
and I did promise to do this, and who else would I turn to?” Rocky bent forward
to pick up the fallen Eiffel Tower as she spoke. Still leaning forward, she looked
up at him with an imploring gaze. This movement brought Rocky’s torso in Dedhia’s
line of sight, and as she had herself once said, what her breasts lacked in
size, they more than made up in shapeliness.

“Oh yes of course, I’ll pick
you up at the Highway. Will cancel that program. Heh heh. Sure, Dahanu trip.
Yes. Uh I’ll step away now, I think I…umm…need to sit down,” he said, and
disappeared.

Rocky sat back in her chair
and picked up Madame Bovary again.
She was a woman who could get what she wanted out of men with an arrow shot
from her eyes, but in this instance, she thought, the need to get rid of his
odious presence rather justified the use of the heavy artillery.

####

July
26, 2016 6:15 pm (six weeks earlier)

“Oye, Hormuz. Letter for
you!”

As Hormuz Patrawala walked
into his house, dragging his miniature genuine replica McLaren F1 car through
the layer of dust that was customary in all houses in Andheri, these words fell
on his ears like sweet, angelic music. Discarding the car upside-down on the
floor, its wheels still rotating, he rushed - not towards where his father held
out the letter towards him, but towards the calendar. The Patrawala’s wall
calendar, a gift from Kaizaad Daruwala
and Sons, Wine Merchants, had pictures of liquor bottles on it, something
that had always piqued the boy’s interest (and made his father think back
wistfully to the time before he had been asked to lay off the alcohol by Doctor
Golibaar). But today, for a change, Hormuz was concentrating on the dates and
not the alluring picture above it of a bottle of Beefeater’s Gin.

It was the 26th of
July, 2016. His idol, Harry Potter, an orphan just like himself, had also
received his letter of admission to Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the end of July. Hormuz sighed. His
happiness, beginning somewhere near his pinky toes, worked its way up his spine
and let itself off through his mouth as a whoop of joy so loud that his father
dropped his tea-cup, spilling the brown liquid all over the tablecloth, and
made his mother drop an egg into the frying pan without breaking it first. The
resultant dish was not as bad as she had feared, but Ternaz Patrawala’s
culinary genius is a story for another time.

“It’s here! I knew it, I knew
I had magic!” screamed Hormuz, and ran again. Sohrab held out the letter in his
hand, but his son raced straight past him towards the bedroom.

“I say, is the boy all
right?” asked Sohrab in a low voice, addressing his wife.

“Hush!” she said, as their
son emerged from the room clad in a black cloak, a Wizard’s hat and holding a
twig in his hand. It had been his birthday gift, a complete set of Wizarding
Clothes brought from the Harry Potter store in Universal Studios by his Uncle
Berry from Florida.

“Can I have my letter now,
please?” he asked, in as grave a voice as his eleven-year-old’s vocal chords
could produce.

“There you go,” said his
father.

He read it once. And twice.
And thrice. It was not exactly what he expected, but then, the ways of teaching
young Wizards magic in India would surely be different than in England. His
Aunt Rocky had hinted at something like this. Well, two weeks was not the same
as spending the whole year in a marvellous residential school, but he would
make sure he learned as much magic as he could. He was nothing if not a
determined kid, was Hormuz Patrawala.

####

July
26, 2016, 5:45 pm (earlier that day)

“Well, what’s this, then? A
letter for Hormuz!” said Sohrab Patrawala, mild-mannered accountant with Contractor
Constructions, looking at the plain white envelope in his hand.

“For our son?” asked his wife
Ternaz, wiping her hands as she emerged from the washroom of their two-bedroom
Andheri flat.

“Only Hormuz I know” pointed
out Sohrab, holding the envelope up in his hand. “It’s from…your Uncle Soli.”

“Oh.”

There was a long silence as
husband and wife looked at each other.

“Ought we to open it?” she
asked, pushing back a stray strand of dark-brown hair from her forehead.

“It is for him,” her
husband muttered.

“We don’t know what’s in it. What
if the old man’s written something about his mother?”

Sohrab tapped the envelope on
the table.

“The boy knows he’s adopted.”

“But not that his mother…”
her voice trailed off, and she looked meaningfully at Sohrab.

“Well, won’t know until we
find out,” said Sohrab, and carefully pried the envelope open. He read through
the two-page letter slowly and then handed it to Ternaz.

“He’s inviting Hormuz to stay
with him for a couple of weeks in the mid-term vacation in September.”

“But after all these years,
why would Soli Dorabjee suddenly remember that he has a grandson?” wondered
Ternaz. “We used to call him Big S, you know, because he was so tall and
strong. But what happened to Shireen…it broke him. Do you think he wants to
make up for it or something?”

“Maybe he just wants to meet
Hormuz,” said Sohrab. “He hasn’t been to Mumbai since your cousin died, has he?
That’s the last time he saw the boy?”

“Yes, he signed the adoption
papers, said the boy needed to stay in Mumbai if he wanted to go to a good
school and he was happy to see him adopted by his favourite aunt.”

“Isn’t your sister Rocky his
favourite aunt?”

“That’s because I’m his
mother now, you idiot!”

“Er yes, of course. I guess I
can drive him to Dahanu…”

“He should enjoy himself. The
estate is huge – I’ve only been once, but it’s…well, huge.”

“At any rate, it isn’t a bad
thing if he knows his grandfather better, you know. After all someone has to
inherit the chikoo farms…”

And for a moment, as they sat
in their matchbox-sized Andheri apartment, Sohrab and Ternaz Patrawala allowed
visions of a family estate and acres of farmland in Dahanu to float before
their eyes.

“Damn,” said Sohrab suddenly.
“I can’t go to fetch him back, I have to go onsite to Nasik for some work that
weekend.”

“I’ll tell Rocky to go, she
loves taking her little Nano for a spin anyway, and she’s quite a favourite
with Uncle Soli.”

“How did that happen?”
wondered Sohrab.

“Rocky looks a lot like
Shireen,” said his wife with a sad smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was
all her idea. Well, put the letter back in the envelope. Let Hormuz open it
himself.”

“The way he’s been looking
through the letters when he comes home from school, you’d think he was
expecting an Income-tax refund,” chuckled Sohrab. “Wonder what’s with the kid
sometimes.”

“Children can be weird,
Sohrab. Don’t you remember what you were like as a boy?”

Sohrab Patrawala thought back
to his own childhood in sailor suits, reciting ‘O Captain My Captain’ before
assembled droves of relatives, and thanked the Heavens that he had grown up.

####

Present
Day:

Farid Mohammed, who works on
the Dorabjee estate, claims to have overheard a strange conversation between
old Soli Dorabjee and his niece, the beauteous Roxanne, as she started up a
white Hyundai sedan to take little Master Hormuz home. The boy had gone to say
good-bye to Tony the horse and Farid had been loading his luggage in the
backseat.

This is how he recounts it:

“Did we overdo it?” the old
man asked.

“Oh no, got what he deserved,
I say,” she had replied.

“It was mostly for little
Hormuz, you know, the motorized horse cart and the remote-controlled lights.”

“I know, Uncle Soli, it was
really darling of you. He does love Harry Potter so much!”

“That chair’s leg being
broken was a co-incidence though, and that fire sprinkler malfunctioning.”

“Yes, of course. A
co-incidence.”

“Rocky, did you have anything
to do with it?”

“Uncle Soli, are you implying
I sawed through a leg of that chair and kicked it the exact moment Hormuz swung
his wand?”

“Rocky, you’re an evil, evil
girl.”

“Hardly, Uncle S. I just
think a man who has completely forgotten how to be a child can do with an
occasional, violent reminder that magic is real,” she grinned, looking rather a
child herself.

“How did you manage the
sprinkler, though?”

And here, Farid swears to
anyone who asks, the young woman held out her hand, showing a tiny ball of fire
about the size of a marble that danced from finger to finger, and said,

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
time. This existential doubt has led him
to grow up to be a writer while not actually being a writer.

He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
conviction that modern civilization is in an interminable decline.